EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

I seem to recall a saying that "everything old is new again." Don't know who said it first, but I sure hope it's true. Because if everything that is old becomes what is new, that's good news for Suzy and me. That will make our learning curve so much easier.

We both used to be pretty good at computers. In fact, we bought our first home computer back in 1976, or thereabouts. It was a Radio Shack Color Computer that used our TV as its monitor.. And everything was in color! Games were in color, graphics could be in color, if you could find graphics. And it would do things.

My brother Chuck bought a Commodore computer about the same time, but that's not part of our story, just a little side visit.

The Color Computer came with 16K memory; we upgraded to 64K and knew we were set for life! I learned to write programs in Basic, and used them for many things including calculating retirement plan benefits for the employees at our Safeway Division Office. What a thing that was, a real computer right in our home!

Pretty soon, though, the Color Computer was obsolete, and we bought a Tandy TRS-80. I think it had 128K, which of course we soon upgraded to 640K. Over the years we have owned, or been obsessed by, over a dozen computers, and we've gradually fallen behind in being able to use them fully.

Now we have so much "sharing" over the Internet that we just can't keep up. My mother always taught me about sharing, how good it was to share my toys, how it was good to share our good fortune by donating to worthy causes, how good it was to share our time and talent by volunteering to help others. But she never imagined that we'd be asked to share our total lives, including secret thoughts, through such things as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, constant texting, continually hanging on the cell phone.

Here's a screen from Facebook, if you haven't seen it before.

And this one is from Flickr.

We've learned to blog, of course, by stepping up from mass e-mails to MyTripJournal and now to Blogger. And we're pretty comfortable with that. We've avoided such things as Twitter and texting. But recently our family all joined Facebook and share photos that way, so we had to join Facebook if we wanted to see those pictures. Now they joined Flickr to share photos, and we've had to join that also. Haven't the slightest idea how to use either program ourselves, but it's a great way (I've been told) to share photos. I thought we were doing pretty well with Picasa WebAlbums from Google.

So now we will learn a little about Flickr and Facebook. Maybe when the family gathers here in August they'll give us lessons in those two programs plus whatever else new they find. That'll be good. Keep us new and young and growing!

In the meantime, here are some pix we pulled from those sites on the Internet. First is our grandson Sam, who is edging closer to 15 every minute.

Then we have the newest one, Darren, our 4-month old great grandson.

Darren with his parents Adam and our granddaughter Renee

Darren with his mother Renee.

And Darren with his "Great Auntie Deb."

"Everything old is new again." When do we go back to pasting snapshots on the black pages of bound photo albums? When, perish the thought, will we all go back to writing letters by hand on paper? Ah, progress happens, and it carries us along with it in ... Our Life on Wheels!